Last week, The Alexandrian had a post on Pidgins. The upshot is very similar to the language rules in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is that the more similar two languages are, the more likely characters can find enough common vocabulary to crudely communicate. For instance, when I visited Norway, I had the sense that if I had retained any of the German I took in college, that I’d have been able to understand a bit more Norsk than I got from speaking English, which in turn gave me more advantage than if I had spoken Korean or Quechua or Hebrew.

“Let’s see how much our language overlaps” is one way you can get a contact language and probably describes the origins of Sabir (“lingua franca”). However, a “pidgin” properly is when diverse groups all encounter each other (typically as slaves or contract plantation workers) and borrow vocabulary from the socially dominant group’s language to form a new proto-language. Notably, contact languages and pidgins lack much in the way of grammar so it’s hard to distinguish orc slays elf from elf slays orc. In the second generation, a pidgin will spontaneously develop a grammar and linguists call this a creole, though the speakers themselves may continue to call it “pidgin.”

One of the classic D&D tropes is that a gang of humanoids often includes “a leader type.” In old editions, this humanoid foreman gets a one-line description as “fights as [humanoid one increment higher by hit dice]” and in 5e they get their own page in Leomund’s Condominium of Antagonists. Back on Earth, it is true that basically all cultures have some level of hierarchy, with some people, almost always male, having more power and influence than others.* However the details of what human leader types look like varies a lot and anthropologists distinguish between various leader types in ways that can be subtle, but imply very different social structures.

One of the classic articulations of the distinction is in Sahlins’s article “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia.” In both Polynesia (e.g., Hawaii and Tahiti) and Melanesia (e.g., New Guinea and Fiji), there are traditionally men with particularly great influence in a community, but the nature of influence varies. Polynesians have chiefs or kings in a way that is very familiar cross-culturally. The status is not earned but one of noble blood that marks out the nobility as distinctive but vulnerable to pollution. Melanesians have “big men,” a status that is achieved through giving and receiving gifts. As such, gift exchange scholars are obsessed with big men and their associated practices of potlatch (competitive feasting).